teaching

Listening has been an interest of mine for some time. As an undergraduate studying music composition, listening was the core of my creative practice. It has remained central to my practice as an educator, though I rarely teach music. I chose to study listening and its multiple meanings and implications in educational settings for my integrative masters project at Bank Street College of Education. I completed the study (and my degree) in Spring 2016 and am happy to share an excerpt of the resulting paper here....

I just attended an interesting talk at Museums and the Web from some very smart folks from the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. The talk, titled “Connecting Learners and Museums through Educational Metadata Initiatives,” was a great introduction to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and some of the ways the Smithsonian is using this framework to improve the metadata of their many thousands of online learning resources. (The paper accompanying their presentation can be found here....

Without launching into a detailed description, Visual Thinking Strategies is a great way to get learners of all ages and abilities to talk about and learn about visual art together. In fact, seeing it in action–seeing children as young as kindergarten or first grade quickly start to develop their visual literacy–is so inspiring that it makes me wish there were an analogous tool in music education. What would it take to adapt VTS’ approach of close looking to close listening?...

What is my philosophy of education? I love the sentiment that R. Murray Schafer conveys in this statement: “Do not design a philosophy of education for others. Design one for yourself. A few others may wish to share it with you.” To me, this reinforces the learning that, as a teacher, I share with my students. I think one of the main reasons that I love to teach is that I also love to learn....